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For some time, I have had a web site called kbsearch.info, which was created a few years ago when I first discovered Google Custom Search. It was a result of playing with this new (at the time) service from Google and creating search engines for some IT vendor knowledgebase. The site was rather basic and I didn't do anything with it. The site wasn't published, but Google found it, and it has had a trickle of traffic ever since - usually much less than 100 visitors a day.

However at the end of last year I started to split off some of the content from amset.info out to their own sites. This was content that wasn't core Exchange or Outlook related, but was responsible for a significant proportion of the traffic. A page I wrote six years ago as a getting started guide to the Command Prompt received more visits a day than the next five pages put together. It now has its own site at http://dosprompt.info/With these additional sites, I implemented a common core design across them all. This design needed to be applied to kbsearch.info, and it was then I realised how poor it was and that the site needed some attention.

At around the same time, I was starting to play around with Windows 7 in some more depth, including the accelerators that are built in to Internet Explorer 8. The Google search tool was very useful, but there wasn't one for the UK version of Google. I found one for Canada, so I pulled it apart and modified it for the UK.

I therefore wondered if I could combine this newfound knowledge of IE search Accelerators with my kbsearch site. The reason for this was that I had created a custom search that was simply a web search engine, so that I could search Google without getting results that were mangled with their tracking information when you copied the result. An example of the URL that is returned is this: